As I write this post flying back from TechEd, North America (check out Day 1 keynote), it never ceases to amaze me how technology has really changed our lives!!! Speaking of which, what an honor that all of you voted System Center 2012 as best Microsoft Product at TechEd. Thank you for your support! We here have worked incredibly hard over the past few years to develop System Center to meet your needs and having this award means a lot to us. Below is a picture of the award; not the best picture I admit. It’s going to find a home in building 44 at the Microsoft Campus.

And now for what we all have been waiting for… YES, it is here!! We are super excited to announce the availability of CTP2 of System Center 2012 SP1. With the recent release of Windows Server 2012, Release Candidate, this release of System Center is targeted at supporting that. While at TechEd, the buzz about Windows Server 2012 was evident and we are thrilled to be able to release CTP2 which supports this incredible release of Windows Server. Given the plethora of capabilities in Windows Server 2012, this release of System Center has significant investments to provide you a management solution based on a rich platform.

While at TechEd, we had a session which talks about what’s coming in System Center 2012 SP1. Given the breadth of capabilities in SP1, I was able to cover only a few key things, but it’s a good place to start your journey with CTP2. The recording was not up as I write this, but should be available by early next week. In addition there were deeper dive sessions on each of the System Center components which you should check out at the TechEd site.

This release contains updates to all the System Center components. See below for more information and stay tuned for additional posts describing the component updates.

Upgrade: CTP1 cannot be upgraded to CTP2 and CTP2 will not be upgradable to Beta.

Production Use: This release is not intended for production deployments. It’s targeted at giving you an early preview of some of what’s coming in this SP1 release.

Scenarios: We specifically focused on a key set of scenarios documented here for this release.